Development of Lower Body for Vehicle Driving Robot, HART

Abstract

This paper presents the development of a lower body for a full-size humanoid platform, HART (Human Assistive RoboT). The design objective of HART is to enable the robot to drive off-the-shelf vehicles in human-centered environments. To accomplish the goal, two technical design requirements which include kinematic adaptation and low-cost manufacturing are addressed and explored in this study. First, the overall hardware configuration and software control architecture of HART are presented. Then, the kinematic and dynamic specification of each joint and its design process are described. The kinematic analysis and motion planning of HART are also provided for the vehicle handling task such as control input manipulation. Last, the built platform is tested and evaluated through experimentations using two different types of ground vehicles.